These clips
illustrate Bob Morgan’s approach to creating music for picture. The
images selected provide the challenge of creating both atmosphere and drama
over a short time - scale. Various compositional techniques have been used
to realise the original visual conception, but throughout, improvisation
is the key to the dramatic intensity.

The mpeg files are very large but do present the work in the best possible
quality.

Improvisations by trombonist Alan Tomlinson are woven into a furnace
of harmony. Industrial strength sounds power to a climax and give way
to a brass band finish as Peter Howson’s vision of dark satanic
steel mills becomes the stamp for which the painting was commissioned.
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Ethereal combinations of tenor, male alto and boys’ voices float
over Nick Stephens' double bass harmonics to produce a supernatural aural
world, imbuing these strange circles of light with a spiritual quality.
Carefully composed to accentuate the dynamics of the lights playing around
the Madonna, subtle moments are picked out as a miraculous presence is
invoked. Strange voices glide across an attic and a wild circus of double
bass glissandi give an impression of a psychic disturbance in the stairwell
of an old house.

Brutalised
and despairing characters captured by the flourish of paintbrush and saxophone.
Each is given a different voice, a roar of anger or a wail of pity, from
the same instrument. Although war artist Peter Howson’s first three
characters are victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, they are no less
convincing when transported to New York by Bob’s saxophone, where
baseball–capped Neanderthals seem to jeer obscenities at their suffering.